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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Tech gets harder to master. Newer, more difficult tech cannot become distributed across teams as fast as earlier, simpler tech. Can any team be so superior that no other team can replicate the research? I'd argue it gets more probable by the day.

There will come a point when no usable information will seep outside the walls of firms or small teams. Some techs will evolve into black boxes. You really can't tell exactly what goes into a CPU chip these days.

There's a high probability that there will be, if there already aren't, "untouchable" tech firms, with so tricky in-house theoretical knowledge, research and production methods and equipment, that no matter how much resources are thrown at it, competitors can't catch up.

And if these people are smart enough to stay quiet and out of sight, which they will be, the competition won't even know what to look for, until it's way way too late. The spy organizations of the world know this.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

The US was the first to develop nuclear weapons. We promptly used two, then stopped.

IIRC, in 1945 the US only had two available to use. And it used both of them.

And I don't think it had many for some years afterwards. A handful of kiloton-range bombs do not convey worldwide omnipotence.

For purposes of comparison, the RAF and USAAF dropped ~ one million tons of bombs on Germany in the last year of the war.

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